Inspired by the recent discussions of what kinds of books would
encourage the spread of Haskell, I whipped up a draft table of contents
for "Haskell in a Nutshell."
You can find it in PDF form at
http://nellardo.com/lang/haskell/hianTOC.pdf (it should have the fonts
embedded - OReilly uses a couple of oddballs) and in ASCII text at
http://nellardo.com/lang/haskell/haskell-in-a-nutshellTOC.txt.
While there are page numbers attached, you should simply ignore those
for the moment :-) Rather, I'd be interested in feedback on the
structure etc. Oh, and please don't just rip it off and write it
yourself :-)
Like "Java in a Nutshell", the first part is a firehose description of
the language. As Haskell is somewhat different from what most OReilly
readers are used to, I've included a bit more about different ways you
can run Haskell (which, incidentally, points out that it runs *everywhere*).
Also like "Java in a Nutshell", the last part is a reference to common
packages.
The middle part is a bit different - a short "cookbook" of
semi-practical programs addressing fairly common programming tasks -
some of the kinds of things you'd typically do with Perl or C++. I think
it needs more "recipes" of course, but I'd like to know if the general
idea is working.
Brook
ps - for the curious, I have in fact written a textbook before
(object-oriented programming for a first-semester course, from 1994...).
And I'm using O'Reilly's FrameMaker templates, so the draft is
"camera-ready" (hence the page numbers - the TOC is automatically
generated).